Can you brief us about SpaceBasic’s core services and what differentiates them from their competitors in this segment?
SpaceBasic is a B2B SaaS platform that empowers colleges and universities to enhance student success through a seamlessly connected campus ecosystem. Our platform simplifies campus life for students with features like Automated Campus Housing, Digital Cafeteria, SpaceBasic Pay, Smart ID Cards, and an upcoming Marketplace that enables access to job fairs, internships, and placements. For faculty and administrators, SpaceBasic delivers AI-driven insights that streamline routine operations, resulting in up to 5x cost savings and operations that are 8x faster. Importantly, we also help institutions significantly reduce their carbon footprint and promote long-term sustainability on campus.
Our journey began with a critical insight during extensive due diligence: nearly 80% of educational institutions in India rely on outdated, manual processes for core campus functions like housing, cafeteria management, and access control. These fragmented and paper-heavy systems lead to inefficiencies and a higher environmental impact.
My own experience as a founding employee at a product-led startup in Australia sparked a desire to create something meaningful for India’s education sector. A serendipitous meeting in the Bay Area with Indu Navar in 2017 revealed a shared passion for transforming campus life through technology. That meeting inspired me to return to India and build SpaceBasic—a platform designed to modernize campus operations and drive real change in education infrastructure.
How does SpaceBasic integrate with existing university ERP or student management systems and is it customisable?
Yes, SpaceBasic is customisable. Automating campus workflows is crucial, especially since many universities still rely on manual processes that slow things down. Take maintenance requests, for instance. Previously, these were recorded in notebooks, requiring ongoing coordination between students, wardens, and facilities teams, right from checking material availability to confirming student schedules. This manual system often took 7 to 10 days to resolve even basic issues.
With SpaceBasic’s automated workflow system, the same tasks are now completed within just 1 to 2 days. That’s a dramatic improvement in speed and efficiency. But the benefits go beyond turnaround time. Automation enables predictive data analysis, allowing campuses to track request frequency, identify recurring problems, and anticipate maintenance needs before they escalate. This results in smarter decision-making, reduced operational costs (up to 3x savings), and a significant boost in efficiency, up to 5x faster processes across campus management.
What kind of encryption protocols are implemented for sensitive student and operational data?
At SpaceBasic, data security is at the core of everything we do. We implement advanced encryption protocols to ensure that all user information, especially student data, remains protected at every stage. Our platform is built on secure, robust APIs that meet stringent security standards, ensuring consistent and reliable protection across all partner campuses.
How does SpaceBasic structure its backend architecture to support real-time campus operations across 100+ institutions?
We’ve built a modular and multi-tenant backend architecture that allows us to serve over 100 institutions while maintaining flexibility for campus-specific workflows.
Each university gets a dedicated environment within our system, so data is isolated and secure, but we also maintain a core shared framework that supports real-time updates like mess attendance, maintenance logs, or student check-ins. We rely on scalable cloud infrastructure (we’re on AWS) and use a combination of event-driven services and smart caching to ensure the system performs smoothly, even during high-load periods like admissions or room allotments.
What’s been really rewarding is seeing how this setup lets us roll out new features without disrupting ongoing operations. We’re constantly balancing scalability with customisation and that’s something our engineering team has gotten really good at over time.
What KPIs are most commonly tracked by universities using your dashboards?
It varies a bit depending on the type of institution and what modules they’ve adopted—but there are a few KPIs that come up again and again.
Most university admins closely track room allotment efficiency, student check-in/check-out times, mess usage (especially through QR scans), and maintenance ticket resolution times. A lot of leadership teams also keep an eye on overall digital adoption—we show them heatmaps of usage across departments, and that helps drive internal accountability.
Lately, we’ve also seen increasing interest in data around student engagement—things like community event participation, cafeteria feedback loops, and even alerts around absenteeism. The dashboards are designed to be actionable, not just informative.
What challenges have you faced in maintaining version control for dozens of institution-specific deployments?
That’s been one of our toughest balancing acts, to be honest. Each institution has slightly different workflows. Some want hostel applications tied into ERP, others don’t; some need multi-language support, others are fine in English. We’ve had to build a system where the core product remains stable while allowing for edge-case customizations.
Version control and QA for these variations was a challenge. But over time, we’ve moved toward a plug-and-play approach where custom features are handled as modular extensions. We also have institution-level flags in our codebase now, so we can toggle features on and off without pushing different versions.
Our deployment pipeline includes environment-level testing, and our customer success and engineering teams work pretty closely to ensure we don’t accidentally break anything during updates.
Any plans for expansion or product launch we can expect soon?
In terms of geographical expansion, the response from Southeast Asia has been really encouraging. We are deepening our footprint there. The digital campus space is still evolving there, and we feel like we can add a lot of value.
The second is around AI-powered automation. We’re working on features that help institutions go beyond dashboards and move toward decision support. Features like auto-flagging anomalies in student behaviour or predicting peak maintenance loads are a few things we are working on. We’re already doing some of this in early pilots and hope to launch more broadly by the end of the year.
We’re also enhancing our cafeteria and finance modules. With this, institutions can track real-time consumption, manage subsidies, and even integrate with student wallets.
Enjoyed this interview? Now, imagine yours. Write to:
editor@thefoundermedia.com
